“Get outta here.”
“Spar with me sometime, you’ll see.”
“Honey, I get hold of you just once, I could tear your arms off like chicken wings.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I haven’t fought someone your size since grade school, aside from a different kinda wrestling, that is.” He sighed quietly. Christ, looking at her, he yearned to be fifteen years younger, even ten. Practically dripping nubile vivacity, her face was achingly pretty, with huge brown eyes, button nose, and all the soft, rounded parts in the places that would have turned his much younger brain into Puree of Mooning Idiot.
She was giving him a long look, and then she moved with effortless speed. Something thunked into the seat of his stool, right between his thighs, a finger’s breadth from his scrotum.
His eyebrows went up as he looked down. One of her black lacquered hair needles was sticking in the stool like a ten-centimeter javelin.
She crossed her arms, having spilled not a drop of her beer.
He wet his dry lips and tongue. “Uh, so where’d you learn ninja-fu?”
“It’s ninjutsu, O Multicultural One. And there are schools. My dad was a mixed martial arts instructor who was trained in ninjutsu.” She took a drink to swallow something besides beer.
He watched the carefully concealed grief behind her eyes, a scar she couldn’t hide all the time. “What happened to your dad?”
“Convenience store robbery. Some gang-bangers strung out on Krok started shooting up the place. He took out all seven of them before the last one got off a lucky shot.”
“Sorry, kid.”
“I’m not a kid! He saved the lives of six other people in there. I wondered what the hell was taking him so long.... Anyway. No money, no medical plan. He died right there. No resurrection for him.” Bitterness tightened her voice.
“Your mom?”
“Never met her. All I know is that she was Filipina, and dad really loved her. He would never tell me any more than that.”
“So how often do you have to beat these yay-hoos away with a ninja stick?” He thumbed over his shoulder toward the fighters outside.
“Pretty much every day until they get the idea.”
“What idea is that?”
“Muscle-bound meatheads aren’t my type.”
“What type is that?”
“The nerdy poetic type. Write me a sonnet and I’ll cream my shorts.”
“You’re too young to talk like that.”
“Fuck you, Gandalf. You don’t think women are sexual beings with as much right to it as you have?”
“I know damn good and well they are.” A great many purely sexual beings had crossed his path.
“Are you threatened by a woman who knows exactly what she wants, can defend that position, and doesn’t need a man to make her a whole person?”
He considered this. “Threatened, no.” Intrigued, yes. Feeling like a dirty old man, yes. Even in this day and age, what she described wasn’t exactly typical. Women’s rights had cycled through numerous fits and starts in the last two hundred years as the never-ending wheel of change ground through the road gravel of religion and ingrained beliefs. Over a hundred fifty years after women won the right to vote, in some of the country’s religious or otherwise backward enclaves, women were still treated almost as brood mares, property.
She waited for him to add more, then shrugged and took another drink. “You gonna give me that back?” She pointed at the needle still between his legs.
“I’m not sure you should be allowed around sharp objects.”
She snorted, stepped forward, and snatched it.
As she tucked it back into her hair, he asked, “You ever have a boyfriend?”
“Jesus Christ! Intrude much?”
“I can imagine a whole parade of nerdy, poetic types following you around like puppies.”
The way she hesitated told him there had been precisely one.
“What happened?” he said.
“Same thing that always happens when you’re young and stupid and drunk on hormones. It ends badly, with a bang and a whimper.”
His imagination exploded with scenarios. He opened his mouth to ask about them when he noticed the tenor of the gathering outside had changed. The sounds of fun and excitement were now drowned in an obnoxious, angry chant. He peeked through the blinds.
A battered, rusty school bus with a huge, black crucifix painted on the side now sat parked about fifty meters away. Thirty-odd protesters lofted signs and chanted something Horace couldn’t quite understand. The signs contained things like:
LIVE BY THE SWORD, PERISH BY THE SWORD!
BLOODY KILLERZ GO HOME!
DO YOU KILL BABIES TO?
THOU SHALT NOT KILL!
GET A BRANE MORANS!
SCRIPTURE NOT SWORDS!
THIS IS A PUBIC SPACE, NOT A BUCHER SHOP!
“Looks like we got some admirers outside,” Horace said.
“Again? Is there a bus with a huge cross on it?”
“How did you guess?”
“They show up all the time. They’ve apparently decided we’re the soulless spawn of Lucifer himself. Five-to-one the cops show up in the next ten minutes.”
“Sounds like I’d be stupid to take that bet.”
“Trask lets them do their thing for a while. As far as he’s concerned, any publicity is good publicity.”
“I see it does scare some of the fans away.”
A handful of people who had been standing in line slunk away like frightened dogs.
“Yeah, but our media spike doubles or triples every time they show up, so we don’t care about losing a handful of autographs.”
He turned away and took a swig of the beer, some local brew he had never heard of. “Idiots like this are nothing new. They were around even in the early days, especially then.” Then his netlink, lying on the bed, caught the light just right. “Miss Ninja. How evil are you?”
“You say that like mischief is afoot.”
The darkness deepened around the parking lot. The protesters chanted and jeered, and just like clockwork, the police showed up and set out a cordon to keep them at a more easily ignorable distance away from the “lawful promotional event.”
Horace tried to catch a glimpse of Tina on her mission, but there was no sign of her for perhaps ten minutes until she reappeared in the hallway behind him.
“Is it done?” he said.
“It’s done.” She plopped down into her chair with a self-satisfied grin and swigged her beer. With her spectrum of hair tied into a tight ponytail in the neutral gray sweatshirt hood and sweatpants replacing her rainbow polka-dot explosion, she looked completely nondescript.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I had you plant my netlink on their bus?” he said.
“Against the ninja code. Of course, I’m curious, but it is not the shinobi’s place to ask why, only the completion of the assigned mission. So why’d you have me plant your netlink on their bus?”
“There are people looking for me. This will keep them off my trail for a while.”
“Kinda figured that out for myself. Was it about what happened back at the rest stop?”
He sat down and picked up his beer again, nodding.
“So now that you’ve made me your accomplice,” she said, “I have you wrapped around my finger.”
There was something in her voice that made him question whether she was joking. He regarded her for a long moment, and she took another long, slow drink of beer, utterly inscrutable. He wanted to laugh it off, but...
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said with a wink.
He relaxed slightly.
But not completely, as he considered all the ways this woman could now screw him over.
“Remind me never to play poker with you,” he said.
“Everybody else around here figured that out a while ago.”
That night, after the crowds had dispersed and the protesters had driven away
in their bus, Horace sat in his berth, familiarizing himself with Trask’s stable of fighters by reading the program for the upcoming event in Albany. The main event was Lex Lethal versus The Dark Horseman.
Trask’s stable had a good mix of finesse fighters, weapon specialists, mixed martial artists, and outright brutes. Lex Lethal was one of the latter. According to Lex’s profile, he favored bludgeoning weapons such as maces, tetsubo, spiked gauntlets and clubs, with an aggressive, charging-bull fighting style. Definitely not a finesse man.
Movement in the doorway door caught Horace’s attention. Bunny stood there, giving him a look or wonderment and awed fear.
“I can’t believe you,” she said. When his confusion prevented him from answering, she came in and sat on the bed, her hands trembling. “I haven’t seen a sweep net like this in a long time.”
“You going to have to tell me what you’re talking about,” he said.
“You have some scary flipping people after you.” She swallowed hard, and her eyes were flicking back and forth at lightning speed from him to some internal data feed, multi-tasking little bits of meaning from several directions at once. When she finally spoke, her voice took on a strange arrhythmic cadence. “During the promo event, at this one moment, there was this enormous spike of net activity. It was like someone turned a homing beacon on, right in this vicinity. Are you going to pretend you have no idea what I’m talking about?”
“No. What happened?”
“It was like someone called sooie! to a bunch of starving hogs, or laid out a fresh carcass for the vultures. Spybots started circling, converging from all over the net. The hard and soft networks in this area went crazy. So when the spybots got a lock on that signal—your netlink signal—they got close enough for me to check them out.”
“You don’t just have implants. You’re a slicer!”
“Rehabilitated.” She held up the prison tattoos on her knuckles. “Anyway, the higher-level code was something I hadn’t seen before, so I corralled one of the bots and de-compiled it. It was written in Cyrillic characters. Russian.”
Horace nodded slowly.
“But it’s not smooth like government surveillance stuff. It’s rough, back-alley, brute-force kind of stuff. Nothing elegant about it.” Her expression twisted with distaste. “I’m still trying to track it, but they’re good at covering their tracks, as good as the black mercenary agencies.”
“Would it scare you worse if I told you I already knew most of that?”
“No, because I haven’t gotten to the worst part.” She swallowed hard. “No one in the world has this kind of slicing expertise except major governments, the Chinese Triads, the Indian Tigers, and the Russian Mafiya. Heck, the Russian FSB steals their slicing tricks from the mafiya. Trackers, feeler-bots, contact-sifters, the whole shebang. I would be completely unsurprised if everyone you had ever contacted from that netlink now had taps on their voice and data accounts. You’re in some deep poopy, my friend. And so is everyone you know.”
A Lilly-scented chill went up his spine. “Don’t I know it, sister.”
“Turning that thing on was a death sentence.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t have it anymore.”
She deflated with relief. Her gaze flickered again for several seconds. “Yes, it’s gone.”
“Are we pulling out soon?”
Even as she nodded, the awnings and signs whined and clunked as they retracted. The hum of the power plant grew.
“If they get a fix on me again somehow,” Horace said, “can you block their slicers?”
“Block them, yes. Fight back, no. I’m prohibited from doing anything invasive or destructive. I have a lock on my software as part of my parole. The spybot I tore apart was already highly illegal, so I could have my way with it. Care to tell me who it is?”
“The Russian mob.”
“Does Trask know?”
“He knows.”
“What did you do?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“I cut off Dmitri Mogilevich’s head and left it in his lap in the back of a limousine.”
“Why?”
“He threatened someone I care about.”
“But now his organization is threatening everyone you care about.”
“Looks that way.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Kill them all.”
“I doubt that’s a feasible plan.”
“It’s all I got.”
“How are you going to manage that?”
“Working on that part. Then again, if they catch me, problem solved.”
“But not a solution that looks good for you.”
“I’ve had my life.”
“That’s a pretty fatalistic attitude.”
“Realistic. I got no regrets. Well, maybe one or two. But going down fighting sounds better than being the meanest geezer in the Old Fighters’ Home. And now they’ve been thrown off the trail.”
“The only question is how long before they figure it out. If they interrogate any of those people, they may well put two and two together about how the netlink got on their bus.”
Horace had nothing to say to that. He hoped that he hadn’t just called down a drone strike on a bus full of ignorant Bible-thumpers; however misguided they might be, they didn’t deserve extermination.
“You are a pack of trouble, Mr. Harkness.”
“Call me Hark.”
“To be honest, I’m not sure I want to be your friend.” She stood.
“Wait a second.” He reached into the pocket of his bloodied jacket and withdrew the netlink of the Russian assassin from the truck stop. “Can you slice this?” He held it out to her.
“Let me guess, it belongs to the bad guys.”
Horace nodded. “I’m looking for numbers. Evidence. Physical addresses. If I have to, I’ll start paying personal visits.”
Bunny stared at it for almost a minute before she took it from him.
She held the netlink in trembling hands, but it wasn’t just fear in her eye. A hint of challenge gleamed deep from behind some internal firewall.
CHAPTER TEN
Early the next morning, Horace stood in the door to Bunny’s cabin. She tossed something at him, small and shiny, and he caught it against his chest. The Russian netlink.
“It’s clean,” she said. “Don’t thank me now, but I poked into it. That was one very dirty device. Right before it sensed me poking around and wiped itself. But I was able to retrieve all of your data from your old one during the night before it went offline.”
“Good morning, Miss Bunny,” Horace said, nonplussed at being summoned to her cabin at the crack of dawn.
Her face was pinched. “Did you catch what I said?”
“My old netlink went offline?”
“Someone either turned it off, or it was put out of commission.” She let that hang in the air a moment before continuing, “And about the dirtiness of that little toy. It was running on a pirated piggyback signal. Encrypted. Untrackable. I changed the code on the piggyback signal so that it’s now unique. I even scanned it for any add-on homing signals. It’s still untrackable, but now it’s yours.”
Horace stared at the piece of plastic, glass, and microcircuitry. “Miss Bunny, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Thank me by not dying, and by not getting me killed along with you. There’s something you obviously haven’t registered yet. If I could slice your old netlink and matrix all your data, contacts, messages, and stuff, so could someone else.”
At that, a chill went down his spine.
“The password is ‘Bunny Rules,’” she said and went back inside.
The ring chime for Lilly’s netlink dinged for thirty seconds, then the system asked if he would like to leave a voice message. He didn’t. He tried two more times, without result, the sense of dread in his belly deepening with every passing chime.
“Dammit.” Then again, in h
er line of work, for safety’s sake she probably wouldn’t answer an unknown caller.
He called Jack, who picked up on the second chime. “McTierney Investigations.”
“Jack, it’s me.”
“Hammer? Sweet titties, amigo, I’ve been trying to get ahold of you!”
“Here I am. What’s the skinny on Lilly?”
“She’s gone, man. Can’t find her. Or her kids. She hasn’t been to work, checked her boy out of the hospital early. I went to her place, but there’s two goons watching it.”
“Goddammit. You sure it was her who checked the boy out?”
“I couldn’t get anyone to tell me it wasn’t. I ran a trace on her netlink, but it’s offline, just like yours has been.”
“I’m calling from a friend’s.”
“There’s something else. I might have to go underground myself for a while. My car was busted into and ransacked last night. My office and apartment might be next. I don’t plan on being here when they are.”
“I’m sorry about all this, brother. I gotta find a way to make it go away without giving them my head and nuts on a plate. When I got a plan, I’ll let you know.”
“You could go to the cops, the FBI.”
“And go to jail for Murder One, right before the Russians shoot me in my cell and ass-fuck my corpse? You know there’s plenty of cops on the mob’s payroll.”
“Witness protection?”
“I got a slicer here tells me that their netbots are on par with the Feds. They want to find me, they’ll find me. For all I know, they’ve sliced your netlink.”
“Jesus, man, you’re getting paranoid.”
“No, it’s probably worse than I think. This needs to go away. I have to make this go away. If you hear anything about Lilly, let me know, right? For all I know, she took my advice and went on vacation.”
“Sure thing,” Jack said, and they disconnected.
Maybe if he left some sort of text message that only she would understand, she would figure it out. After a moment, he thumbed in:
HEY THIS IS MAX FROM WORK. GOT A NEW LINK. YOU BETTER CALL ME. THE BOSS IS PISSED.
At least that would get her attention. And so the waiting game began.
The Hammer Falls Page 10